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Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

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Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#211

Post by Jach »

stormking wrote: post #136
Jach wrote: post #80

If you're strictly asking about things a self-taught hobbyist programmer may have missed, then I second the suggestions here to skim through a CS degree curriculum and dig into anything that's unfamiliar. As one possible example, maybe you're solving a problem trying to parse some text, and you're in over your head with ad-hoc regexes and conditionals and type casts and exceptions all over the place. If you've seen t…

"If you've seen the concept of a grammar (likely to come up in CS programs, though not all)" Really? That was one of the very first topics in my first semester. How do you teach CS without grammars and the Chomsky hierarchy?

I wondered if someone would ask about that... It's just my own recollection from years ago when I looked at a bunch of CS curricula from public and private schools. There was a lot of patchy variation. If the topics were covered at all they'd typically be done in optional electives like a compilers course, or "theory of computation" course, taken in junior or senior years. Also depending on the school such an elective might not actually be available anymore (I looked at current-semester/last-semester offerings to try and identify those) and is only part of the catalog for historical reasons. Maybe it was offered once, but not anymore, in part because students having the choice would rather take the new data science course or Advanced Networking or whatever to fulfill that elective instead.

I do think the problem is mostly a function of having lots of choice. Everyone's got their own list of what a CS degree absolutely must cover, but there are going to be differences, and schools are incentivized to let students carve their own path. Let's look at this list: http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/ I've looked at a lot of intern resumes over the past few years and broadly they've been impressive from a hire-to-BigCo perspective but I would be surprised if many of them knew much if anything about a large majority of topics from that list. Even narrowing to the "better" schools. I also don't even agree with that list, I just don't think it's realistic to cram all that into a 4 year program on top of all the other STEM courses, humanities courses, and project courses...

Going back further there's the continuing problem of "dumbing down". It ties into a school's incentive to offer more choices to fulfill the graduation requirements (creating an "easy" path), but as a problem in itself it's worth considering. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java... is a classic rant about it, not a very good one but it points at one consequence of the problem. I would bet there's still a sizable bunch of current-year CS graduates who never had to deal with pointers. Maybe I'll do some data exploring some time with the resumes I still have to see what fraction put C or C++ somewhere to make a weak proxy measure.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#212

Post by btown »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #116
theossuary wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two great resources I've been going through are - https://dataintensive.net - Really deep dives into different types of data storage solutions, their history, and how they actually work. - http://www.cattell.net/datastores/Datastores.pdf - Good paper that helps differentiate similar but different datastores. Really helpful when you're trying to pick a modern data solution.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications is probably the best O'Reilly (if not overall technology) book of the past decade.

The talk on "Turning the database inside-out" [0][1] by the author, Martin Kleppmann, is a fantastic intro to these dynamics, and it's something I'll always recommend to both experienced and inexperienced data modelers and backend developers.

It goes pedagogically through the way things are typically done in a relational database in such a clear way that word-for-word it's one of the best tutorials I've seen... but it also weaves a narrative of "how can this be done better/more scalably/more reliably/more flexibly-to-business-needs" in pointing to a streaming/event-sourcing architecture. You may or not need the latter right away, but it's a fantastic tool to have in your toolbox to be able to say "ah, this new requirement feels like it would benefit hugely from this architecture."

Especially for OP who's starting to think about the "why" of messaging queues, this could be a fantastically valuable first step.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0

[1] https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou...

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#213

Post by gitgud »

Design patterns were enlightening to me. The idea of expressing concepts in software design which can be reused was what got me out of the stone age of programming. You can describe Pub/Sub or the Builder Pattern and quickly implement it into a project and know it's advantages and limitations, definitely worth checking out if you haven't already.

http://wiki.c2.com/?CategoryPattern

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#214

Post by afarrell »

new4thaccount wrote: post #185

SQL (even if just SQLite) as databases open up a lot of power. Vim or Emacs for powerful text editing. A low level language. Sometimes Python doesn't cut it, or it is pretty suboptimal. If you're writing a trading bot, is speed of execution not important? Operating System knowledge can be helpful at times. I bought one of the No Starch books "How Linux Works" and it is very helpful. The command line and by that I gue…

I thought this course did a good job at getting SQL to stick in my brain, largely due to the relational algebra section. https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/abou...

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#216

Post by sn9 »

Zealotux wrote: post #119
crimsonalucard wrote: post #86

Nobody mentions what self taught programmers miss the most. Theory. And not just algorithm theory.

Could you expand on that if you don't mind? I'm a self-taught programmer currently in the process of realising just how much I miss from theory, my list so far on theory fundamentals includes: • Mathematics and probabilities, and their applications to CS (e.g. formal methods) • Design patterns (OOP, functional programming) • Data structures • Algorithms, time complexity • System architectures • Software strategies: C…

The canonical undergrad CS theory text is Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation.

The prereqs are a comfort with discrete mathematics and proofs and a course in algorithms and their analysis.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#217

Post by greenyouse »

This might not be for a hobbyist since the setup is difficult but validating your frontend work with automation is very interesting. I didn't realize for a long time that I could use visual regression tools and Selenium at the end of development to catch bugs. I'm surprised that there aren't more tools in this space targeted for developers. Selenium Grid with WebdriverIO is incredibly helpful. If you put together a visual regression system for validating your daily work you could save some serious time.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#218

Post by eranation »

Not tools but more of a mindset: Application Security, OWASP top 10, Web Security. Learn what is XSS, CSRF, what is a CSP, why HSTS exists, why CORS allowing * can be dangerous. Also what is OAuth, OIDC, SAML, etc. How to store passwords securely, how to add security to your devops cycle. Having a good security mindset can be a great asset to any team.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#219

Post by btown »

AaronFriel wrote: post #208

Value/message/actor/event oriented programming like you mentioned is useful for building distributed systems. I am a huge fan of going a step further and learning this model: Imperative shell, functional core. The external shell of code in a project is responsible for network connections, console IO, etc. But the internal guts of a program should be largely functional, that is, instead of mutating (changing) values,…

I'm also a fan of "imperative shell, functional core, imperative implementation of that core," where within a function that you promise to have no side effects or very specific side effects (say, a component's render function, or a transformation from one complex data representation to another), you should still feel free to use loops, imperative-style control flow, even network requests, etc. I find this puts folks used to "imperative everything" at ease, while still maintaining almost all of the benefits of functional-core provided that execution is scheduled properly.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#220

Post by new4thaccount »

afarrell wrote: post #214
new4thaccount wrote: post #185

SQL (even if just SQLite) as databases open up a lot of power. Vim or Emacs for powerful text editing. A low level language. Sometimes Python doesn't cut it, or it is pretty suboptimal. If you're writing a trading bot, is speed of execution not important? Operating System knowledge can be helpful at times. I bought one of the No Starch books "How Linux Works" and it is very helpful. The command line and by that I gue…

I thought this course did a good job at getting SQL to stick in my brain, largely due to the relational algebra section. https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/abou...

The W3Schools site is what helped me

https://www.w3schools.com/sql/

It has a database you can query and add to and what not.

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